Burden
by daimazu
Summary: Night Head Genesis Naoya is musing over his relationship to his brother Naoto.


Disclaimer: I don't own Night Head/Night Head Genesis and no remuneration will be earned by this fiction.

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I always felt I was a burden to my brother. I knew I was too dependant on him; but how could I help clinging when he is the only person in the entire world I can endure to touch and be touched by?

He always sheltered me, and he gave me what I needed most in times of distress: the comfort of being tightly embraced by someone who was not afraid of me and my strange psychic powers.

He is the only one who can touch me without hurting me, but I'm afraid it doesn't always turn out the same the other way round. For even touching niisan can cause embarrassment for both of us.

That woman….

Of course I _knew_ that niisan had a relationship with her. He was a goodlooking healthy young man in his early twenties, for crying out loud, and secluded from the rest of the world, and she was a woman and young too, so it was only natural for them to get together.

It's not as if physical desire was totally unknown to me. It's just that I cannot satisfy my needs like everyone else. I cannot get close, let alone mate with someone – I who cannot even touch someone's hand without the most awful effects!

Niisan was not kept back by such restrictions, and so it was only natural that sooner or later he would give in to the urge of his physical needs. There are times when they are stronger than any concern he may have for my sake.

But of course this created some awkwardness between us; the cursed nature of my abilities, my being sucked into everybody's psyche at the slightest physical contact enabled me not only to know about niisan and his love-affair with that woman, but to know _everything_ of niisan's sensations. It was like a projection on my mind, like I had been together with that woman too. Naturally this was not very pleasant for both of us; I don't even want to know how the woman might have felt about it, had she really known my psychic power.

We never talked about it, and we silently agreed to ignore it, because niisan knew how much I depended on him not to lose all contact with the world outside and the living beings in it. I have always been in serious danger of enclosing myself within my own consciousness, secluded from every perception from the outside, so I might not go crazy with the stimulus satiation. In a way niisan has always been my link to the outside world as well as my shelter from it.

So in the end for him it was to choose between me and having a partner. It could not have been an easy choice, even though I knew he loves me and made his decision in my favour from all his heart.

I was a burden to him, I thought, perhaps a burden he would be relieved to be released of? His subconscious might wish to be rid of me, so he would be able to lead as normal a life as he possibly could manage with his own psychic powers, although he consciously would never have left me.

I knew that he rejected the advances of Kurahashi Kanako which would have lead to far more than a one-night-stand, had he agreed to spend the night with her like she suggested. niisan was as attracted to Kurahashi-san as she was to him and he had seen a bright and _norma_l future by her side. Yet he rejected her – and only for my sake. In a dream he had seen he was going to be separated from me if he chose her; he felt like he was sacrificing me – and he would not be happy with such a decision, no matter how much he might be in love with a woman. So he simply refused to let that happen.

I was not all too happy to be the reason of my brother's misfortune: just because I had no one else I could turn to, he was not able to have anybody else but _me_.

Until the day I happened to teleport myself from our current location to meet Shoko in a dimension out of time and space. I had vanished from niisan's sight all of a sudden; and though this had happened before, he got frightened, because I did not return at once. Mikuriya-san had told us before that Shouko had already reached a stage of disembodiment and that our own abilities now would enable us to do the same if we wished for it.

If we wished….

Shouko was certainly the only possible mate for me, wasn't she? I felt not attracted but _drawn_ to her by an irresistible power. It may not exactly like _"being in love"_ but something very similar, though even stronger.

So if I wished to be with her…

Niisan was afraid I had chosen to give up physical existence in preference of a mere psychic one in order to join Shouko.

But I returned, and the moment niisan saw me, everything that had been untold between us was clear at the moment he touched me, holding on to me as if for life. I felt his desperation at my being gone, his fear and his worries, and I felt all of the loneliness he was to experience without me by his side. He had even rejected a prostitute who offered to comfort him when she saw his desperation; he was sure he could now endure nobody else but me.

So I was looking straight into his heart and I knew: if there was a burden to be carried, it was a shared one. Like niisan would never leave me, I would not leave him either. Because he needed me as much as I needed him – or even more.


End file.
